Have you thought about how using your keyboard feels while you’re gaming? No, it’s a weird question, and you’ve been too busy rounding the corners of Laguna Seca or slaughtering giant rats on that side quest to really pay much attention to the up-down motion of each key as you’re fighting for your life on screen.
Besides, you can’t miss what you never experienced, and most of us have only used the non-mechanical keyboards that’ve been coming with desktops and built into laptops for the past 25 years. But once swap out the dull, mushy key presses of your current laptop for a mechanical keyboard, you may find it’s impossible to go back.
I’ve been a convert to the tactile pleasantness of mechanical keyboards since I bought my first one. It’s a Filco Majestouch 2 with Cherry MX Blues, and it’s been a fixture on my desk for 10 years through several moves. (There’s now the newer Majestouch 3, which looks awesome.)
Finding a mechanical keyboard to buy back then involved traveling deep into the bowels of an ancient temple at the end of an Indiana Jones-esque scavenger hunt. That’s what the far corners of the internet is, actually. But it was worth it, and the old Filco will probably outlive me.
No capacity for bad keyboards
Mechanical keyboards are keyboards with a physical, mechanical switch beneath each key cap. You feel every press differently than you’re used to. It’s crisper, more tactile, more pleasant to use than the standard capacitive keyboard that feels like typing on popped bubble wrap. By the late 1990s, capacitive keyboards were built into every laptop and wedged into every free keyboard that came with a desktop computer. These keys have no physical switch, just a silicone mat that registers an electrical current when each key is mushed into it.
Everyone has used a capacitive keyboard. You’re probably using this right now if you’re reading this on a computer. Key presses on a capacitive board are shallow, mushy, and indistinct. What’s more, over time these keyboards became flatter, flatter, and flatter, which had the effect of reducing typing accuracy and increasing wrist pain.
There’s no reason a capacitive keyboard can’t be ergonomically shaped to induce proper wrist position and accurate speed typing, but the millennial obsession with thinness and sleekness effected a shift away from the cupped design that keyboards should possess. Mechanical keyboards, in almost every case, incorporate proper ergonomics. Using mine completely eliminated my carpal tunnel pain, and I type faster and more accurately than on my various MacBooks’ keyboards, from 2015 to 2024, Airs and Pros.
switch hitter
You can’t talk about mechanical keyboards without acknowledging the impact of Cherry. They’ve been copied, hoarded, drooled over, and scorned for their popularity. Cherry MX switches come in all sorts of versions that feel distinct from one another: Reds, Blues, Greens, Clears, Blacks, Browns, and so on. Red, Blue, and Brown are the most common.
Typists favor Cherry MX Blues and Browns, and all these switches’ descendants and imitators, for their crisply tactile activation point, the point where the key registers a press. It has something reminiscent of the mechanical typewriter’s feel to it. Part-way through a key press, there’s the noticeable but subtle bump of a Brown where the key switch registers the press. Blues have a more pronounced (and louder) bump that feels clickier and clackier.
Gamers who play fast-paced games, such as first-person shooters, lean toward the Cherry MX Reds, as well as their offshoots and imitators, for the linear key presses that have no bump like the Browns and Blues, which can feel distracting in gaming situations.
Cherries? Colors? There’s a lot of terminology around switches, and it’s all very subjective and personal. I’ve seen strategy-game enthusiasts gush over Browns, and people who type for a living swear by Reds. My own choice is the polarizing Blues, one of the loudest and clickiest of keys. I’ve had guests flee the room from the noise, and partners stumble out of the bedroom groggily eyed to complain the noise was keeping them up.
brand-new game
Japanese brands Filco and Happy Hacking Keyboard made a name for themselves in the West early on in the 2000s, and Ducky, from Taiwan, had a particular hold on gamers’ attentions with their line of keyboards that glowed in customizable color patterns from RGB LEDs backlit beneath the keys.
It was gamers who noticed these Asian companies and reintroduced them back into the West long after mechanical keyboards had become forgotten relics. Das Keyboard was one of the early American companies to make a name for itself in the second wave of mechanical keyboards. And after enthusiasts had sought out most of the long-discontinued IBM “buckling spring” keyboards that once came with IBM computers, an American set up Unicomp to begin remanufacturing them. Buckling springs have a particularly springy feel to them and require a lot of force, which turns some people on and others off.
Matias, a Canadian brand, burnished its name using the Alps keys. Japan’s Topre, who’s made everything from car parts to refrigeration units, provides Topre switches that are said to feel like pressing down on miniature blocks of wet clay.
All these companies remain on the market today, and all are very good. Each has its own characteristic personality, mostly down to the choice of key switches. These brands’ variety pales before the third wave of mechanical keyboards that elbowed its way onto store shelves in the late 2010s, though, once the major gaming peripheral companies and Chinese manufacturers got in the game.
mountain of choice
Demand for mechanical keyboards became so great by the mid-2010s that Cherry was having trouble keeping the industry supplied. Yet you still couldn’t walk out of a Best Buy with one. Then the gaming-peripheral colossuses Logitech, Razer, and Corsair came for their share. Suddenly everyone was making a mechanical keyboard, and they were stocked on store shelves and Amazon.
Razer began making its own mechanical key switches. Chinese newcomers to the market, Kalih, Gateron, and Outemu stepped into the supply void with some very nice Cherry MX clones. And now there are a whole ton of manufacturers.
Bothering with a mechanical keyboard comes down to how much you enjoy writing or gaming on your computer, or how much you wished you enjoyed it. For those eager to delve into the zen of grasping a more physical connection to this world that keeps trying to put pixels between us, mechanical keyboards are the most satisfying way of doing that, short of picking up a pen and paper.
The post Want to Level Up Your Button Mashing? Make the Switch to a Mechanical Keyboard appeared first on VICE.
The post Want to Level Up Your Button Mashing? Make the Switch to a Mechanical Keyboard appeared first on VICE.
